Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
When people think of John Ford, they mostly think Monument Valley and the like – but, in the case of one film that is perhaps unfairly remembered most for beating Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Award at the 14th Academy Awards, Ford told a story set in a Welsh mining town. Check out Alan’s entry on How Green Was My Valley in his One Best Picture After Another series.
Meanwhile, Julie took our Six Damn Fine Degrees feature back to 1994 for Tim Burton’s retro sci-fi black comedy Mars Attacks! As they say: Ack ack, ack ack ack!
We stick with genre cinema for our October espresso podcast, a companion piece to our main October episode on non-scary ghost films: Sam and Matt got together to talk about two ghost films of the scary variety, The Changeling and Pulse.
But you don’t have to go to horror movies for frightening fare, as our next trailer shows.
Mege: Get out of here. This is a documentary? Meaning: this happened without conscious manipulation and/or distortion? How lucky can one doc film crew get? Because this looks like strange fiction, like Bergman did a prequel to Cocaine Bear, when the bear was still Straight Edge. This may just be Werner Herzog‘s new favourite movie.
Matt: It’s refreshing to see a different take on a classic series of fantasy novels, in particular after the Chronic-what?-les of Narnia series, which was middling at best, in spite of starring the likes of Liam Neeson and Tilda Swinton. Greta Gerwig’s film makes the interesting choice of adapting not The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which C.S. Lewis wrote first, but instead going for The Magician’s Nephew, which was the sixth book in the series but tells the story that is set the earliest in the chronology. It’s clear from the trailer that Gerwig is taking some liberties – but it is equally clear that this will be the most cinematic adaptation of Lewis’ novels yet. Having recently rewatched Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, I am more than a little curious what she’ll make of this rather old-fashioned classic that, in the hands of someone different, could easily turn out to be a twee CGI fest that will be forgotten within a year.
